Monthly Archives: September 2011

On Friday September 30, 2011, Dr. Scott Harris will present ”OSHA in Healthcare: Out of Sight & Out of Mind?” at the 2011 AOHP national conference in Minneapolis, MN.  Our web visitors can download sneak preview slides of Scott’s presentation here.

OSHA claims nosocomials to be “among the leading causes of death in the United States, accounting for an estimated 1.7 million infections and 99,000 associated deaths in 2002.”  If accurate, healthcare-associated infections — these things you catch while there for something else — kill more people in the U.S. every year than AIDS, drug overdoses, food-borne illness, murder, highway, rail and plane crashes, lightning, tornadoes, West Nile Virus and workplace fatalities COMBINED.  OSHA is using strong language with clear intent to take action and in their 2010 Request for Information (RFI) characterizes healthcare as having “a weak culture of safety.”  Eleven million employees across thousands of sites, incident rates far higher than general industry norms, low inspection rates, complaints driving half of hospital inspections and millions of infections and 99,000 fatalities per year make healthcare an attractive target.  An industry view of TJC accreditation as the program that matters combined with the relative lack of healthcare inspections by OSHA has marginalized occupational health and safety programs within healthcare and nurtured the myths discussed in this presentation.